"By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience. Currently, there are very few wikipedia articles that have videos. We hope that this campaign will bring thousands more to the site and show people how great theora can be. HTML 5 video, which plays without Flash, is a wonderful step towards a more open web - but if it depends on proprietary codecs like h.264, we will still be stuck with a gatekeeper for online video."

Let us all spam Wikipedia, 'cause a good encyclopedia really needs piles of low quality (both in contents and technology) clips!

I don't like h.264 licensing, but you can't force stuff on people like that. If Theora ultimately fails it will be because of its inferiority. If it survives it will not be because of someone's religious war, but because it evolved and actually became better.

I always support superior technology and I'm pretty convinced that h.264 is better at the moment. In a long run it is always better for the superior technology to win. Even patents eventually expire.

If the superior tech always prevailed most of us would be using BeOS (or perhaps even GEOS) today...

Software patents do exist. You can value their danger at zero by focussing purely on technology, but for software developers and distributors, the danger is not zero.

For many, h.264 is simply not permitted. Everyone is permitted to implement and distribute Ogg Theora.

On a technical level, Ogg Theora is quite good, and it is without a shadow of a doubt good *enough* for Wikipedia.

Careful with the "religious war" claims. File format is just one of many aspects of video quality, and the difference between h.264 and Theora is less than 10% of this one aspect. When people ignore everything else and take stances based on this small part of a very small part, that's where I see religous wars.

h.264's patents will indeed expire eventually, in 2018, but by then today's h.264 will no longer be the most technologically advanced format, so by your logic you'll have stopped advocating it.

I have never seen the need for video on a web page, this is one of the reasons I don't have flash plugins. And I believe that things like youtube have helped to greatly deteriorate the quality of the internet by lowering the bar for publishing material that demands thought before uploading, hence I can't really see any point in video on wikipedia.
However if there should be video on the web, then let it at least be an open format so people with alternative operating systems and browsers can enjoy it too if they wish so.